China Boasts Fast Space-Ground Laser Transmission

There is a race right now on who can establish satellite-to-ground laser communications first. Recently, China achieved a major milestone, which puts it ahead of Elon Musk's Starlink.

The nation successfully attained a 100 gigabit per second data transmission rate in satellite-to-ground laser communication. This unprecedented speed — ten times faster than their previous record — opens doors to a new era of space-based technologies.

Chang Guang Satellite Technology, the company behind the Jilin-1 constellation, accomplished this feat. Jilin-1 is reported to be the "world's largest sub-meter commercial remote sensing satellite network."

As per South China Morning Post (SCMP), the data was transmitted between a mobile truck-based ground station and one of the 117 constellation satellites in Earth’s orbit.

Interestingly, this advancement gives Chang Guang Satellite a lead over Starlink.

"Musk’s Starlink has revealed its laser inter-satellite communication system but hasn’t deployed laser satellite-to-ground communication yet. We think they might have the technology, but we’ve already started large-scale deployment," Wang Hanghang, the company’s head of laser communication ground station technology, told SCMP.

Hanghang added: "We plan to deploy these laser communication units across all satellites in the Jilin-1 constellation to improve their efficiency, with a goal of networking 300 satellites by 2027."

With technological advancement, satellites are getting smarter and better at capturing detailed information. However, sending all that data back to Earth using traditional methods is becoming a bottleneck.

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Leftover Coffee Grounds Can Strengthen Concrete

Concrete production could receive a boost once they start introducing a new recipe in the mix that will make concrete 30 percent stronger. This was the conclusion after researchers in Australia found out that adding charred coffee grounds to the mix could solve multiple problems at the same time.

Every year the world produces a staggering 10 billion kilograms (22 billion pounds) of coffee waste globally. Most ends up in landfills.

"The disposal of organic waste poses an environmental challenge as it emits large amounts of greenhouse gases including methane and carbon dioxide, which contribute to climate change," explained RMIT University engineer Rajeev Roychand.

With a booming construction market globally, there's also an ever increasing demand for resource intensive concrete causing another set of environmental challenges too.

"The ongoing extraction of natural sand around the world – typically taken from river beds and banks – to meet the rapidly growing demands of the construction industry has a big impact on the environment," said RMIT engineer Jie Li.

"There are critical and long-lasting challenges in maintaining a sustainable supply of sand due to the finite nature of resources and the environmental impacts of sand mining. With a circular-economy approach, we could keep organic waste out of landfill and also better preserve our natural resources like sand."

Organic products like coffee grounds can't be added directly to concrete because they leak chemicals that weaken the building material's strength. So using low energy levels the team heated coffee waste to over 350 °C (around 660 °F) while depriving it of oxygen.

This process is called pyrolyzing. It breaks down the organic molecules, resulting in a porous, carbon-rich charcoal called biochar, that can form bonds with and thereby incorporate itself into the cement matrix.

The researchers cautioned that they still need to assess the long term durability of their cement product. They're now working on testing how the hybrid coffee-cement performs under freeze/thaw cycles, water absorption, abrasions and many more stressors.

The team is also working on creating biochars from other organic waste sources, including wood, food waste and agricultural waste.

"Our research is in the early stages, but these exciting findings offer an innovative way to greatly reduce the amount of organic waste that goes to landfill," said RMIT engineer Shannon Kilmartin-Lynch.

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Combining Six Oscillators Can Change The Quantum World

Top researchers at EPFL have found a way to combine the power of six mechanical oscillators into one collective state. This is considered a big breakthrough because this will allow the development of ultra-precise sensors and other components crucial for large-scale quantum systems.

Mechanical oscillators are devices found in many everyday tools and technologies. They have the ability to produce precise, repetitive motion by converting kinetic energy into potential energy and vice versa.

An example of this is the pendulum in your wall clock that swings back and forth. Springs and pistons are another example. However, so far, these macroscopic oscillators have been used for regular applications. Scientists want to use them for quantum systems.

This is because "controlling mechanical oscillators at the quantum level is essential for developing future technologies in quantum computing and ultra-precise sensing," the study authors note.

Previous research works have focused on using a single mechanical oscillator for quantum systems. This approach works well for small-scale applications, such as quantum squeezing (a technique to reduce uncertainty in one aspect of a system) or ground-state cooling (cooling the system to its lowest energy state).

However, powerful large-scale quantum systems "demand exceptionally precise control over multiple oscillators with nearly identical properties," according to the EPFL team. This is where findings from the new study could help.

The researchers used a technique called sideband cooling. It involves the use of a laser to cool atoms and ions to their ground state. When this laser is applied to an oscillator, it brings down the thermal vibrations in the system, causing it to become still.

Using this technique, the study authors turned six individual oscillators into a collective system, a hexamer. They also linked the oscillators to a microwave cavity that allowed the oscillators to interact more effectively.

"More interestingly, by preparing the collective mode in its quantum ground state, we observed quantum sideband asymmetry, which is the hallmark of quantum collective motion. Typically, quantum motion is confined to a single object, but here it spanned the entire system of oscillators," explained Marco Scigliuzzo, study co-author and a postdoc researcher at EPFL.

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